1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an air conditioner, and more particularly to an air conditioner to which a removable storage medium is connectable.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional air conditioner, running information during running of the air conditioner and setting information set by an operator is temporarily stored in a random access memory (RAM) of a controller microcomputer, and then necessary information is intentionally stored in a nonvolatile memory such as an electrically erasable and programmable read only memory (EEPROM), which maintains the stored information unless it is arbitrarily initialized (see Japanese Patent No. 2989407, page 1).
There is another conventional air conditioner that is driven based on control information read from an external storage device that has running information stored therein in advance (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 9-229451, page 2).
However, in the air conditioner described in Japanese Patent No. 2989407, the nonvolatile memory such as the EEPROM has a limited memory capacity, and it is not easy to retrieve data from the nonvolatile memory. In addition, when a certain board fault occurs on a control board, the running information stored in the nonvolatile memory such as the EEPROM is initialized due to replacement of the board, resulting in a problem of taking time to recover a state of the air conditioner before the fault.
Furthermore, in the air conditioner described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 9-229451, the control information read out from the external storage device is generalized information in a certain condition, rather than information indicating a running condition of an individual device, and therefore an initialization operation of the control information is also required when replacement of the board or the like is performed.
The present invention has been made in view of the above problems, and an object of the present invention is to provide an air conditioner that can be easily recovered, even when replacement of a board or the like is performed due to a certain fault, a state of the air conditioner before the fault.